EAST LANSING, Mich. — Had he enjoyed celebrating by himself, Lourawls “Tum Tum” Nairn would have have been a track athlete.

Initially, Nairn figured he’d train for the Olympics and use his athletic prowess to climb out of poverty. But the first time the Nassau, Bahamas, native broke the tape in a sprint, he looked around and realized that winning big is no fun when you’re doing it alone.

Then he turned to basketball.

“When I found out I could be part of a team, part of something bigger where I needed other people to succeed, when I understood what camaraderie was, I couldn’t wait,” says Nairn, who got his nickname from The Three Ninjas, a cult-hit movie from the early 90s.

Now the three-time team captain is an integral piece to a Michigan State team favored to make the 2018 Final Four. The No. 2 Spartans, who meet No. 1 Duke on Tuesday in the first game of the Champions Classic in Chicago, will win big this season provided they get clutch play from sophomore sensation Miles Bridges and steady minutes from Nick Ward and Josh Langford.

But the key to another national title under Tom Izzo might be Nairn, a senior who started 30 games last season and led the Big Ten in assist-to-turnover ratio. Though he will never be an offensive threat in the way Bridges is — and he came off the bench in MSU’s first game behind sophomore guard Cassius Winston — Nairn is making a push to graduate as the best leader in the Izzo era, a distinction typically awarded to former All-Americans Mateen Cleaves and Draymond Green.

Green spent the summer before Nairn’s freshman season working out in East Lansing, and was struck by how Nairn pushed his teammates from day one—and how they respected him immediately.

“As a freshman, you don’t come in with that mentality of, ‘I’m out in front of everything. I am the voice. I am the motivation. I am the hardest worker,’” Green says. “You saw that (leadership quality) all the time. you saw it in workouts in the gym when he was the one pushing everybody. He’s the one bringing all the energy to the workout … then you also saw it in the weight room. Like, this dude is jumping around, flying around the weight room, making sure guys are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, flying around the weight room motivating guys to get two extra reps.

“It’s things like that that may seem so small, but those things go a long way. Those things are the difference between being good and great…It was special to watch.”

Kyle Lindsted, a Wichita State assistant who coached Nairn at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kan., says Nairn’s magnetic personality and obvious passion make him the ultimate point guard: Everyone wants to play hard for him.

That’s clear to anyone who watches Michigan State practice. Amid thumping music and a flurry of activity, it’s Nairn’s voice that stands out, screaming and hollering, cheering on his teammates. He slaps the floor when the Spartans need a defensive stop, signaling it’s time to lock down. He applauds freshmen and challenges veterans, celebrating each small success. After Izzo chews out a player who shies away from attacking the rim, Nairn is there, whispering encouragement. The next possession, when that player explodes from the perimeter to the hoop and slams home a dunk, Nairn is there again, beating his teammate’s chest and slapping him on the back, telling him he can dominate anytime he wants.

Says Bridges, Nairn’s best friend: “The first time I was around Tum, he was so loud and crazy, I thought he was pretty weird, honestly.”

Besides being “maybe the greatest teammate ever,” Izzo says Nairn’s value is found off the floor. Acknowledging that Nairn is “a good player, not a great player,” he most appreciates that because of Nairn, “Our locker room is always stable.”

A great leader, according to Nairn, is someone who’s extremely self-disciplined and self-motivated. “You have to be a servant first,” says Nairn, who plans to be a pastor whenever his basketball career is over. “And you have to meet people where they are — you can’t talk to different people with different skills the same way.”

This explains his light-handed touch with newcomers vs. his intense approach with upperclassmen.

But above all else, he believes it’s a leader’s job to show everyone that the key to success is just be yourself. It’s a lesson he learned at Sunrise Christian Academy as a sophomore.

Nairn struggled with consistency back then. One day, he’d come into the weight room hyped, chatting and laughing with teammates, spreading his infectious enthusiasm. The next day he’d be quiet and keep to himself, sapping energy from the room. His play on the floor reflected whatever he was feeling that day until finally, Lindsted pulled him aside.

Michigan State’s Tum Tum Nairn, Miles Bridges and coach Tom Izzo.

“He was our leader, our alpha, our mouthpiece,” Lindsted says. “Some days he’d come in and be quiet because he was working so hard on his individual game. He wanted so badly to be great. But I told him, ‘You don’t have to be cool and get buckets — just be the guy we need.’”

That conversation, Nairn says, changed his life. He finally understood that he didn’t have to score 20 a night to be valuable. So as a freshman at Michigan State, when he was thrust into a starting role for the last 16 games of the season, he didn’t flinch.

“A lot of people don’t understand that you’re most valuable when you’re yourself,” Nairn says. “My freshman year, I wasn’t trying to be anybody else because that wouldn’t have been valuable. Can you imagine if I had tried to shoot 15 times a game? That would not have been effective. I wasn’t intimidated because I understood who I was.”

In truth, there’s not much that can shake Nairn, who had been through more at 15 than most can imagine.

Though outsiders think of the Bahamas as a warm, relaxing vacation destination with some of the world’s best beaches, Nairn grew up in a different reality. He’s quick to stress that he never went hungry, but there’s no denying that abject poverty cripples much of the islands. Nairn says he grew up “in the hood,” though the hood of a Third World country is decidedly different, and worse, from the hood in, say, Detroit. For most of his childhood, Nairn shared one bed with his younger brother Laquan and their parents. Their first home didn’t have its own bathroom. Gangs patrolled the streets.

“My dad, who was a carpenter, hustled for our family,” Nairn says. “He made sure we had everything we needed, but it was really hard.”

At 13, Nairn left his family behind and moved to Florida, hopeful that a two-year stint in the states would improve his basketball skill.

“I had never been away from my family, never flown in an airplane,” Nairn recalls. “I cried every night for three months.”

Back in the Bahamas as a freshman, Nairn played in an annual showcase on Freeport, the island best known as the home of former Oklahoma All-American Buddy Hield. That’s when Lindsted first spotted Nairn, offering him a spot at Sunrise Christian Academy, a private school powerhouse that’s churned out dozens of Division-I prospects.

Nairn blossomed at Sunrise, cultivating his leadership skills and using superior athleticism — he’s remarkably quick with the ball — to catch the eye of multiple Power Five schools. A Top 100 recruit according got ESPN and Rivals.com, Nairn picked Michigan State partially for the Spartan tradition, but also because he needed another family.

Though he speaks every day with his parents using WhatsApp, Nairn’s life is remarkably different from theirs. When making his college choice, Nairn never sought his parents’ advice or consulted with them on the decision simply because “they didn’t know what was going on.” At least one family member gets it now though: Nairn’s younger brother, Laquan, is a sophomore long and triple jumper at the University of Arkansas. He won three NJCAA national championships while at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas.

That’s the one thing missing from Nairn’s résumé: a national championship. When Nairn called Izzo to commit, he told the Hall of Fame coach he planned to leave East Lansing with a national title. To do that this season, he’ll have to continue to be comfortable using what he says is the greatest lesson Nairn has learned under Izzo: how to lead your best friends.

Calling out your best friends when their work ethic isn’t up to snuff is no picnic, Nairn says. But it’s worth it, because that leads to group celebrations, instead of individual achievement.